


In the Stars

by RustedUrsa



Series: Binary Blues [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Author-insert character, Banix AU, Biggs Darklighter (mentioned) - Freeform, Birthday Presents, But again more like teenagers, Child Luke Skywalker, Cool stuff on Tatooine, Cute, Fluff, Gen, I made up the language on Vulgar, Luke Skywalker's Best Friend, Or At Least I Tried, Short One Shot, Sneaking Out, Stargazing, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Unrealistically adorable children, Well more like a teenager, You know that friend you love but they're such an asshole, short and sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-23 17:42:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15611559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RustedUrsa/pseuds/RustedUrsa
Summary: Luke's about to celebrate his fifteenth birthday. But if you asked him, fifteen years on Tatooine isn't worth celebrating.Maybe somebody can prove him wrong.





	In the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Well, look at that, two updates today. I sat down after dinner to fiddle around with this idea I had, and I accidentally finished it. :D

There was an irritating noise on the sandstorm shutters.  _ Taptaptaptap. _

Luke’s wise response was to turn over in his bed and fold his pillow over his head to cover both ears. It was too early for this.

_ Taptaptaptap. _ There it was again. It sounded giddy. Luke didn’t even know how that was possible, but it just was.  _ Taptaptaptap. _

“Go  _ awaaaay _ ,” he groaned.

_ Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap… _

Luke flung his pillow at the window with an exasperated grunt. It soundlessly struck the transparisteel-reinforced windowpane and landed on a pile of spare parts with a pathetic flop.

Great. Now he had no pillow. Muttering resentfully, he pulled himself out of bed and stalked through the sea of laundry and discarded tinkering projects that was his bedroom floor.

He flipped a switch beside his window, and the shutters slid apart to reveal Elzarynn Banix’s wide-eyed, beaming face. He slid the window up and looked at her ruefully.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” he growled.

“0400,” Elzie answered promptly. “Nice jammies. Get dressed; we’re going to Beggar’s Canyon.” She tapped her hands against on his window in a little dance as she bobbed up and down excitedly.

Luke stared at his friend in utter disbelief. He had to remind himself to keep his voice down so as not to wake his aunt and uncle. “Are. You. Crazy.”

“Course,” she said blithely. “Now hurry up, lazy butt, or I’m leaving without you. You won’t ever forgive yourself if you miss this. Trust me.”

Luke rubbed his face and sighed. No more sleep for him tonight. “This better be worth it, Elz.”

 

Elzie threw her arms around his neck the moment he stepped out of the power dome, launching herself at him so fast that one of her dust-blonde braids hit him in the face.

“Happy birthday!” Somehow her voice managed both a whisper and a squeal at once. Like the tapping, it was just something Luke accepted.

A wittier, more awake Luke might have commented that it was hardly “day” yet, or that he’d be a lot happier if she let him get a full night’s sleep. But this Luke just grumbled something unintelligible in language he would never dare use in front of his aunt as Elzie dragged him to her parents’ landspeeder and shoved him in the passenger’s side. He sagged against the imitation brushed Bantha leather, ready to fall asleep again.

“Buckle up!” Elzie reminded him, still grinning.

Luke snarled at her insufferable cheer, but he did as he was told. Birthday. Right.  _ His _ birthday. He was fifteen. Still too young to be convicted for murder. Maybe he ought to remind his young friend of that.

Elzie started up the speeder and headed towards the canyon at top speed. The hours before astronomical dawn were the closest thing to cold that Tatooine ever got, and the high speed actually made Luke shiver for the first time since that fever he’d had when he was seven. There was a suncloak at his feet, and he pulled it up around himself like a blanket.

He glanced over at Elzie, who was handling the landspeeder with confidence. Something about that was off, something that was not quite connecting in his half-awake brain.

Then it clicked. Elzie was twelve. 

“When the hell did you learn to drive this thing?”

She took her eyes off the empty desert just long enough to make a face at him. “You do realize I’ve been sitting in the back every time Beru takes you out for a driving lesson, right?”

“Well… yeah,” said Luke, embarrassed. “But she was teaching  _ me _ .”

“Or, trying to, at least,” Elzie laughed.

“Shut up!”

“You know, I think the reason the landspeeder confuses you is that it only goes in two dimensions.”

“Shut. Up.”

 

They drove to the top of the canyon, stopping right across from the Stone Needle, the  _ least _ imaginatively-named natural formation anywhere in the galaxy. Or, anyway, Luke would bet good money that it was. Its eye was fitted directly before a narrow rift in the cliff right where the canyon began to curve. Biggs talked often about how “threading” it would make an excellent short cut in a race. Luke had his doubts; the eye didn’t look quite wide enough for a Skyhopper, and nothing else would be able to handle the canyon winds at that height. The Needle was certainly an impressive sight in the daylight, but at the moment, it was little more than a smudge of ink on a canvas of black. All three moons had already set, and the morning twilight was a ways off; the only light that touched them came from the speeder’s dim headlamp and the stars.

Elzie cut the engine, leaving them in darkness, and hopped out of the landspeeder without even bothering with the door. Luke stayed stubbornly inside his suncloak cocoon.

“Come  _ on, _ already!” Elzie yanked on Luke’s arm, trying to drag him out of the landspeeder.

“What could possibly be worth coming out here this early in the morning?”

“You’ll never know if you keep sitting here, dummy!”

Luke slumped down in the seat until he was half on the floor. He was tired, cold, annoyed, and he was not going anywhere.

Elzie hit him with her bag.

Well, she didn’t so much  _ hit _ him as let it fall full weight onto his stomach, but it did the trick. It was a testament to how not-woken-up-yet he was that he hadn’t even noticed it on her shoulder. Or that she had apparently filled it with rocks.

Luke coughed and wheezed as he sat up, spewing five of the eight Laimev-resh words Elzie had managed to teach him. The important ones. The ones he couldn’t say in front of his aunt.

Elzie just kept grinning at him. “Hey, your accent’s a little better. I mean, it’s still terrible, but it’s a better terrible.”

“Are you trying to kriffing  _ kill _ me?” he gasped.

“If I was, you wouldn’t need to ask,” she replied smugly. “Now, come on. You’re gonna miss your birthday present.”

“You could have just given it to me at school,” he groused as he stalked to the edge of the canyon at her side, still wrapped in the suncloak.

“I’d have a hard time with that.”

They stared out into pitch-black canyon, Luke bleary-eyed and cranky, Elzie practically bouncing on her toes. Luke’s eyes wandered up to the sky. He had to admit, the view of the stars was beautiful at this time of night. Even if it did make him ache to be out there with them.

“Yes!” Elzie exclaimed suddenly. “Notice anything?”

“It’s cold,” Luke complained. “And I’m not in bed.”

“Look down, dimwit,” Elzie replied. She was pointing to the base of the Needle. Luke rubbed his eyes and sullenly followed her gaze.

There was a glimmer moving around in the bottomless black of the canyon. Luke’s breath caught in his chest and he was suddenly wide awake and on the alert for threats. What was that? A rancor? A Tusken Raider?

The glimmer broadened, and the colors began to appear. In the space of a few breaths it had become an oily ribbon of rainbow light, weaving its way along an invisible path through the darkness. Then another one started up a few meters away, beginning with the same seed-sized twinkle as the first. Luke watched in awe as more and more ribbons of shining color slowly swirled through the canyon, until the base of the cliffs seemed to glow.

“It’s beautiful,” he breathed. “What’s happening?”

“It’s the coolest night of the year,” Elzie replied, as if that explained everything. He glanced at her blankly, and she sighed. “Kezelchets? Tatooine scorpions? We wrote that huge report on them together for school? And, you have no idea what I’m talking about.”

“Not really,” he admitted, still taking in the show.

“They’re hatching,” she explained. “Baby kezelchets are coated in this phosphorescent oil that protects them until their exoskeletons harden. It’s poisonous to reptiles and mammals, so their predators die before they can put a dent in their numbers. Millions hatch from every nest, most of them when the temperature is at its lowest.”

“How have these guys not taken over this whole planet?” Luke murmured in amazement.

“Well, most of them are gonna end up eating each other.”

Luke thought that he ought to be somewhat put off by this revelation, but he was too taken with the display of dancing lights filling his vision.

“How did you know it would happen here?” he asked.

“Remember when we all rode banthas through the canyon last year? I noticed this weird oil all over the rocks, and when we did our report, I recognized it and realized there had to be a huge colony here.”

Luke shook his head, impressed in spite of himself. “The weird stuff you notice.”

“Weird stuff like what’s right under my nose?”

He tried to stick his tongue out at her without tearing his eyes away from the lights. She wasn’t looking at him, and he didn’t blame her.

The ribbons of light widened and spread until they were like veils waving in the wind. They shimmered, curved, and danced like an aurora, and never the same color for more than a moment. Blue phased into green and then to amber along one edge of the canyon, while somewhere else pink was becoming gold and then shifting to turquoise.

Luke was glad he was with Elzie, for she was the only one close to his age who would be able to appreciate the marvel in front of them, and he just wouldn’t have been able to explain it in mere words. Then again, Elzie was the only reason he was out here seeing it at all. It would literally never have occurred to him to search for something this miraculously beautiful on the dust-caked rock he called home.

“Alright,” he said, putting an arm around his friend. “You got me. This was a pretty good birthday present.”

Elzie grinned up at him, and flicked the shorter of her two braids over her shoulder. “This isn’t all of it.”

“Oh?”

Elzie reached into her bag. It hadn’t been holding rocks after all, but a hefty packing container meant for transporting a small, fragile item from one planet to another. Luke’s heart started doing backflips.

“When did they get in?” he cried in delight.

“On yesterday’s shipment,” she replied with a grin. “Sorry I ‘forgot’ to tell you.”

Luke was too excited to bother with a retort as he pulled the container open to see his new macrobinoculars. He’d saved half the season for these, working tirelessly for his uncle, running errands for his neighbors, even doing odd jobs for Merl Tosche at the power station. Even then, he would have had to settle for a refurbished pair if it had not been for Elzie’s parents being willing to order them for him wholesale.

They were perfectly new, shining and pristine, the first unscratched and undamaged metal and glass he’d seen in his entire life. It almost broke his heart to remove them from the protective container and expose them to the harsh elements of his world, but he desperately needed to have them in his hands.

“Wait… Elzie, these aren’t the ones I ordered. They’re…”

“They’re the ones you actually wanted,” Elzie confirmed in a satisfied voice. “I could tell from the way you were browsing the catalogue. They don’t have every add-on feature, but they have the high-resolution magnification, the night-vision, all the stuff you were gushing about.”

“But I can’t afford these.”

“Birthday. Present. Or, anyway, the upgrade is. And it’s from both me and Biggs, so you’d better thank him when he gets back.”

Right. Biggs was down in Bestine, helping out some of his mother’s family. Somebody recovering from surgery or something, Luke didn’t remember. The only downside of the night was that his oldest friend had missed it.

“You guys didn’t need to do this,” Luke said quietly.

“Well, you should have thought about that before being our best friend,” Elzie rebutted.

He turned and hugged her suddenly. She didn’t seem caught off guard, just hugged him back tight around his ribs. Luke’s eyes were stinging, but he was fine. Everything was fine. He had the best two friends on the whole planet. The whole galaxy, even. When he pulled away, she said nothing. And she would go on saying nothing, not to anyone, not for anything. He could trust her with little outbursts like that. He could show her his heart to an extent that he could show no one else. And if there was a tear or two on his face, she’d say nothing about them either. There was even a word for it in her native language:  _ Inkabo’keleth’tse _ , “Your secrets die with me.”

“I’m surprised Biggs let you pay for any of it,” said Luke, examining his precious macros with the same warmth as a mother with her newborn.

“Technically, my part of the deal was to be as annoying as possible while I dragged you out here.”

“Well, I’ll be sure and tell him that you paid your debt in full.”

Elzie beamed proudly. “Thank you.”

Luke lifted the macrobinoculars to his eyes and engaged the night-vision. There was good old Beggar’s Canyon. There was the Stone Needle. All in crystal clear, perfect detail, rendered in brilliant shades of luminescent green. He zoomed up close to the eye of the Needle and engaged the augments that would measure the opening in the rock face. Biggs was right; it was  _ just _ big enough to admit the width of a Skyhopper, assuming they flew threw at precisely the right angle. Well, if anyone could do it, Biggs certainly could. And if Biggs could, then Luke could learn how as well.

Luke switched off the night-vision and raised his aim to the stars. If he slowly zoomed in tight on them, he could almost imagine he was on board a starship, and taking off to other worlds, worlds no longer beyond his reach.

“What I wouldn’t give to be up there,” he murmured.

“Hmm?” Elzie was still looking at the last of the hatching scorpions. Most of the brilliance had faded, but there was still a kind of shimmer over the whole of the canyon floor, like water in firelight.

“There,” said Luke, gesturing broadly. “Out  _ among _ the stars, instead of down here just looking at them. That’s all I want, someday.”

“Dummy,” she muttered, but with clear affection. “We’re already among the stars.”

“You know what I meant.”

Elzie sighed, and took out her own macros, which were old and small and bore the scars of many years, but which she found perfectly serviceable. She scanned the skies for a moment, and then pointed a few kilometers above the horizon. “There. Look there, do you see that star that’s kind of a pale green?”

Luke looked, magnifying the image as much as he could. It was a beautiful green orb with a pale blue corona. “Yeah, I see it.”

“That’s the planet Arkanis. To anyone standing on that planet and looking in this direction, we’re a star. Not every star in the sky is a planet, but every world in the galaxy is a star to somebody. We’re in the stars right now.”

Luke turned to stare at his friend in bemusement. “How do you even think of these things?” he wondered aloud.

She shrugged. “Papa studied philosophy on Alderaan. He says they taught him two things there: how to find the beauty in everything, and how to never shut up about it.”

Luke laughed. He started to peer through his macros again, but he paused with them halfway to his eyes.

“Do you want to try these out?”

Elzie took the macros with exquisite care, exclaiming at all the details of the canyon that she could see. She skimmed the base and located the entrances to some of the hundreds of kezelchet nests that tonight’s hatchlings had emerged from. Luke slung his arm around Elzie’s shoulders and looked down at the morphing shimmers in the darkness, now too faded to show any colors. The sky was growing purple with the pre-dawn twilight, and the air was already starting to grow warmer.

A few more minutes, and then he would remind Elzie that they needed to head home. His aunt and uncle would worry themselves sick if they found him gone when they woke up. Later, he could rush through his schoolwork, rush through his chores, rush through everything in his life that made him feel trapped and stuck and stranded. For a few more minutes, he could just linger. He could just be.

“You realize now I have to spend the next six months thinking of how I’m gonna top this for  _ your _ birthday.”

Elzie giggled. “Nah. You know me. Get me the new Darryl Redstar book, and I’ll be over the moon for weeks.”


End file.
